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| March 1st, 2007 |
I admire Jim Carrey for always trying to break out of his own cage, torn between the career-challenging attempts to remain rich and famous without boring himself to death and still earn self-respect. Handsome, versatile and fearless, he thumps along in a constant battle between the moronic roles he s famous for the idiot farces like Dumb and Dumber and The Grinch That Stole Christmas and the demanding forays into a narrower but more satisfying adult world of artistic achievements like The Truman Show and The Majestic that are usually doomed as box-office flops. I always seem to favor the flops. At 45, he s now trying something he s never done before, a genre film to keep him at arm s distance from the stuff he does in his sleep a violent psychological thriller called The Number 23. The result is different, all right contrived, incomprehensible gibberish that exists for the sole purpose of exposing a miscast star in a career stretch for which he is pathetically unprepared. It s the worst kind of flop, a flop for its own sake.
This guy faces the same on-screen dilemmas as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sly Stallone. It must be rough for him to break out of his cookie-cutter mold to find a balance between the assigned fate of celebrated movie star icon whose fans expect and demand the same goofball double takes over and over again, and the self-fulfilling redemption that inevitably comes with the knowledge that there is more to acting than slapstick, pratfalls, rude noises in the toilet, and custard pies in the face. I knew he could act back in 1992, when he played the alcoholic son of a dysfunctional all-American family in the made-for-TV drama Doing Time on Maple Drive, but he gave up serious acting shortly after that, and from his big-screen breakthrough in The Mask it was downhill all the way. Still, I applauded his courage, mixing sub-mental characters like Ace Ventura Pet Detective with tortured, self-destructive life forces like comic Andy Kaufman in Man in the Moon. Now there is fresh evidence that he wants to pursue an even broader agenda, ignore the easy shortcuts, work hard to prove his value, and maybe get some good reviews for a change. It will take a much better movie than The Number 23 to do it.
Without playing the fool, Mr. Carrey plays Walter Sparrow, a mild-mannered dog catcher with a brilliant wife and teenage son whose sudden obsession with the coincidences surrounding the number 23 crosses over to the dark side of insanity, decadence, and death. Numerology students may be fascinated by the catalogue of No. 23 references contained in the murky gumbo of a script by somebody named Fernley Phillips that run the gamut from the number of letters in both the Latin alphabet and Franklin D. Roosevelt s name, to the most popular psalm in the Bible. The rest of us will giggle and yawn. Anyway, his wife Agatha (a totally wasted Virginia Madsen) gives Walter a book called The Number 23 on his birthday that seems to reveal secrets that apply only to his life. While Walter reads aloud from this mysterious, unpublished para-psychological nightmare, the narration turns into dramatically staged episodes in the cinema of his mind, in which he becomes a saxophone-playing Mike Hammer-style detective who is also a serial killer. In his job, a stray dog bites him, inflicting a deep wound that requires stitches. But in the book s chapters, the same dog turns out to be guarding the grave of a girl he is suspected of murdering. The number 23 dominates everything, linking him with the date of maniac Ted Bundy s death in the electric chair. Are the horrors in the book figments of his imagination, or are the 23 chapters real clues to unsolved crimes? How will it all end? Who knows? Chapter 23 is blank. Dragging his wife and son into a search for the identity of the killer by outlining every 23rd word on every 23rd page, their lives are endangered, and so is the possibility of taking seriously the laugh-out-loud direction by Joel Schumacher, who has been influenced by David Lynch to the point of lunacy. Like Mr. Lynch s curios, the fragments of the puzzle never add up to a completed design. Did I fail to mention that not one word of this movie makes one lick of sense? It would take 23 asylum inmates to explain the ending that finally drives Jim Carrey into a straitjacket and the audience racing for the door marked Exit.
The Number 23 appears to have been made by people on psychedelic mushrooms. It takes the dog catcher the entire length of the film, which covers several months in time, to finish the book, proving only one thing: he s a slow reader. Jim Carrey might secretly suffer from a similar problem. There might be a reason his movies are so bad. Maybe he can t read the scripts. No matter. He knocks himself, growing hair long and filthy, fingernails rotten with dirt, and festering visually to the rancid color green, like Christian Bale in The Mechanic. He takes it all seriously. The audience does all the laughing. Never mind. The Number 23 may be a catastrophe that disappears overnight, but like Banquo s ghost, I predict Jim Carrey will survive the funeral.
In the whimsical fable The Astronaut Farmer, Billy Bob Thornton is so good, so charming, and so inspired by the role of Charlie Farmer, a stubborn Texas cowboy who builds his own spaceship in his barn and launches it into outer space, that he almost makes you believe in Tinker Bell, Santa Claus, and the Easter Bunny. Charlie didn t make it to NASA, but his lifelong dream of becoming an astronaut never died. Nobody in town thinks he s tightly wrapped except his loyal, supportive, and long-suffering wife Audie (Virginia Madsen again, who also skyrocketed into space after Sideways), his two little daughters, and the 15-year-old son he drags out of school to be his flight commander, operating out of mission control in the hayloft. Charlie s credit rating is shot, the bank is foreclosing the mortgage on his 352-acre ranch, and the judge orders a psychiatric exam. But it s his order for 10,000 pounds of illegal rocket fuel under the Patriot Act that brings the FBI, CIA, FAA, the U.S. Military, Homeland Security, and international press to the farm, as well as a real commander of the NASA space shuttle (Bruce Dern, trim and toned with a handsome new hairpiece) who drops in for one of Audie s fried chicken dinners. Does it launch? Well, the first try is a near-fatal disaster that bankrupts Charlie and lands him in the hospital. Then Charlie s father-in-law (Bruce Dern) saves the day (and the movie) and they start all over again, doing overnight what it takes NASA decades of aeronautics engineering to achieve. If we don t have our dreams, we have nothing, says Charlie in the closest thing this heartfelt little family film gets to philosophy. While there s actually no law yet! to forbid an American citizen from constructing his own gravity-defying rocket missile, this is another of those Follow your dream and you will find inner peace fantasies you should not try at home.
Does Charlie at last orbit the moon on his second try? What good is a fable if you know how it ends before you even see it? And it is worth seeing for the honesty, thrill, and dedication of Billy Bob Thornton at his best. There s one kitchen-table scene in which he entices his finicky children to find magic in their cereal that is so moment-to-moment heartbreaking you could swear he studied at the Actor s Studio. Directed with sincerity by Michael Polish, who co-authored the sweet screenplay with his brother Mark, The Astronaut Farmer is a feel-good movie about the indomitable spirit of a can-do dreamer who does when everybody says don t. It is not for cynics. I know it s a fable, and the premise is so ridiculous you may roll your eyes, but I found myself rooting for Charlie and his Seven-Up can of a rocket ship in spite of myself. In boots, spurs, and bow-legged jeans under his home-made Stanley Kubrick space suit, Billy Bob makes dreamers of us all.
Lesbians are the new golden retrievers. In life, they are powerful and free and everywhere. In the movies, they keep popping up in one labored, unfunny comedy after another cuddly, housebroken, and begging for acceptance and equality that is already a no-brainer to a civilized audience. Gray Matters is another coming-out flop that combines passe elements of the TV show Ellen and forgotten indie-prods like Puccini for Beginners. The gimmick here is that a tightly knit brother and sister who live together in such co-dependence they sing Fred and Ginger tunes, finish each other s sentences and share the same toothbrush face an insurmountable sibling crisis when they fall in love with the same girl. Gray is a beautiful advertising copywriter totally confused by her benign sexual confusion (Heather Graham, totally lacking in self-confidence?) and her brother Sam (played by Tom Kavanagh, from the defunct TV series Ed) is doing his residency at Mt. Sinai, specializing in heart transplants. He s perky, attractive, and clueless in the ways of the world. Otherwise he d notice that Gray has no interest in any gender other than her own. (His favorite movie is Free Willy!)
One day in the park they meet a sexy zoologist named Charlie (Bridget Moynahan). Sam falls as fast as she can declare her passion for hot fudge sundaes. But Gray develops an equal spark for Charlie, and tries to kill her interest in Sam. He snores and has a hairy back, she warns. Charlie is undeterred. She works with animals, remember? They decide to fly to Las Vegas and get married in six days. It is typical of this movie s endlessly absurd contrivances that Gray and Charlie take a bath in the same tub, get drunk on champagne, and get up onstage to sing I Will Survive with guest star Gloria Gaynor. This all happens in the first few minutes, and there s a whole 92-minute movie to go. By the time Gray and Charlie fall in bed and lock lips, you pretty much know where this dour, poker-faced farce is heading. Believe me, there is no reason to stick around and find out.
Too old to play ingenues, too young to play mothers, and too tired of playing whores, the lovely and capable Heather Graham seems content just to take whatever jobs come along. She is criminally wasted here. Tom Kavanagh has an easy, grinning charm, but he lacks the experience and charisma to carry a leading role as the only meat in a girl-girl sandwich. He has been directed by Sue Kramer (who also wrote the tedious screenplay) to mumble so fast that he swallows whole sentences at a time. Worse still, there is the horrendous spectacle of watching the pathetically miscast Alan Cumming as a randy heterosexual Scottish cab driver who accompanies Gray to her first gay bar in drag. I don t know what to say about the tragic walk-on support of the great Sissy Spacek as a screwball psychiatrist who dispenses therapy to her patients in bowling alleys and on rock-climbing expeditions. She seems so embarrassed to sink this low that she actually looks like she s trying to hide her face from the camera to conceal her misery. She needn t have bothered. We understand why she s blushing. The audience is miserable with empathy already.